Nirenjan’s Space

I guess it’s high time I put forth my view on reservation. The point is that we had Dr. Raj Reddy, the founding Director of the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, speaking at the inauguration of our new facility on this topic.

His major point was that the majority of students who get into professional courses are from the urban environment. Very few rural students have got into a good engineering college, due to lack of quality education. The Government should take steps to identify the talented individuals and equip them with the necessary skills to make them an all round person. Simply pulling a random guy and telling him - “Look, you have a seat in IIM-A thanks to reservation. Go there” is not going to be any use if the guy is not talented. The problem comes from the fact that there is not enough quality education in the rural areas, and even then, the talented individuals are often unable to afford it.

Well, this is a delayed informative post to inform you folks that I’ve quit my job at HCL Tech and joined the SSN School of Advanced Software Engineering and am pursuing my Masters in Information Technology, with specialization in Embedded Systems Engineering.

Microsoft has been granted an exclusive contract to be the sole Engine Control Unit (ECU) supplier for F1 from 2008.

So we can expect to see the following things in 2008:

1. All cars would require to be fitted with a system board running 64 Intel Pentium 5 processors running at 6.4 GHz and having a minimum of 512 GB RAM per processor.
2. All cars would need to be retrofitted to include a generator inline with the engine shaft. The ECU power needs would require 99% of the engine output to drive the generator.
3. If any car stalls on the parade lap, it would cause the remaining cars also to stall. The race would then have to be postponed to the next decade while Microsoft determines the cause of the stall.
4. Turning the steering wheel by at least 0.0001% at speeds of more than 1 cm/h would cause the brake to be applied automatically.
5. Attempting to refuel the car while replacing the tyres would cause the fuel valve to close prematurely. The only solution would be to have separate pit stops for fuel and tyre changes.
6. Occasionally, entering the pit lane would cause the car to stop. The pit crew would have to push the car into the garage, remove the front wing and reattach it to restart the engine.
7. The safety car feature is implemented by sending a common signal to all cars. This signal would cause all cars to move at a speed of exactly 11.309734 km/h (3.14159 m/s for those curious/nutty enough to monitor speeds in m/s). The only way to remove the safety car feature is to move all cars to the starting grid in their current lap positions, stop the cars, remove the rear wing and reattach it.
8. Sensors placed on the car will detect possibility of collision and stop the car in the event the possibility exceeds 0.001%. The ECU will also emit a banshee scream, causing the cars (and spectators) in the hearing range of the scream to shut down (spectators collapse)
9. Cars fitted with less than the minimum specified hardware (refer point #1) will not run at speeds of more than 100 km/h due to slow processing

After a long time, I’ve enjoyed seeing Ferrari in action, with some brilliant moves at the Indianapolis Speedway.

Go Schumi…

Did I mention never to trust statistics? Well I’m about to repeat it…

Brazil lost…